‘Common Spaces’

June 5, 2014

The Kitchen

512 West 19th Street, Chelsea

Through June 14

Being conceptually oriented and activist-minded, the annual exhibitions organized by the curatorial fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Studies Program are anomalies these days, and, for that reason, automatically of interest. This year’s show, “Common Spaces,” has a timely theme and several good artists. Not everything works, but enough does to make you want to hang around and figure out what’s going on.

The title refers to terrain that should be public property but isn’t, unless political action is taken to make it so. A well-known local example, Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, once turf for Occupy Wall Street, isn’t directly referred to, but a prototype is in documentary photographs of street protests in Seattle during the 1999 World Trade Organization conference, taken by the great Allan Sekula (1951-2013).

Other space-claiming moves are quieter. Bani Abidi shoots images of non-Muslim Pakistanis living their lives in the streets of Karachi, empty and quiet during Ramadan. In a video, Klara Lidén marks New York City as personal territory by moonwalking through it all night.

History can be a form of territorial reclamation. The Italian artist team Bianco-Valente (Giovanna Bianco and Pino Valente) cover the Kitchen’s walls with what look like abstract webs of Sol LeWitt-style drawn lines. But seen up close, the lines turn out to be handwritten transcriptions of interviews the artists recorded with Chelsea residents who lived in the neighborhood before art-industry-inspired gentrification, and still consider it home.

The show has a utopian side. It’s there in Mary Mattingly’s video about an ecologically self-sustaining urban houseboat, and in a film by Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri about generously proprietary spirits-of-place in nature.

But the general view is more tempered. Sreshta Rit Premnat’s mirrored protest plaques could either reflect social realities or serve as standards for a culture of narcissism. Natalie Bookchin explores YouTube as a digital commons, primarily as a forum for exposing economic inequalities. Amy Balkin bought a patch of Tehachapi, Calif., to create a permanent international commons.

And a text-and-performance piece by Huong Ngo and Hong-An Truong poses a simple question: What space does an unwelcome immigrant occupy? Space in between, forever.

Although a few pieces refuse to yield a clear reading, this year’s curatorial fellows — Maria Teresa Annarumma, Molly Everett, Joo Yun Lee and Kristine Jaern Pilgaard — have smartly marked out and argued their theme. And how interesting to consider it in the intensely privatized, protest-resistant context of the New York art world.

Correction:

An art review on Friday about “Common Spaces,” at the Kitchen in Manhattan, misidentified the Amy Balkin work documented in the show. It is “This is the Public Domain,” in which she bought a parcel of land in California that is to be free to everyone in perpetuity — not “Public Smog,” a project intended to create a clean-air park in the atmosphere.